Homer? Homer? Why write about Homer in a science fiction magazine? The Iliad isn’t SF. It’s a gory tale of Bronze Age warfare. (Surprisingly gory. The battle scenes, with Homer describing where the spear goes in, which organs it encounters on the way through, and what happens to the spearee when Achilles has finished spearing him, make Game of Thrones seem as tame as Alice in Wonderland.) A case can be made that The Odyssey, full of monsters and sorceresses, is fantasy fiction of a sort. Even so, why talk about those two mighty poems here?

Because I’ve just been reading a brilliant book called Why Homer Matters, by Adam Nicolson, that opens a line of speculative thought not only about Homer and his great epics but about the history of Bronze Age Europe, a revisionist view of early European civilization that stirs in me the sort of fantasy-keyed thinking that tales of Atlantis do, or Robert E. Howard’s sagas of the Hyborean Age . . .